True to the motto “The most important thing is not to stop asking.” by Albert Einstein, the ASIM conference “Simulation in Production and Logistics” (SPL) took place last week as a digital conference. It was hosted by FAU’s FAPS Chair and THI’s Business School. Scientific conferences are based on learning about the latest findings in science and research and their implementation in industry, and on presenting and discussing one’s own scientific findings in the community and checking them for applicability. In addition, personal exchange with other scientists and users and social events are part of the conference program. It is not easy to offer all necessary aspects in the digital world and to create a real conference feeling for the participants. The organization team of the ASIM symposium SPL succeeded convincingly, as the responsible persons Prof. Jörg Franke (FAPS/FAU) and Prof. Peter Schuderer (THI) stated. In addition to a conference package with the printed 696-page conference proceedings, coffee and sweet delicacies to sweeten the conference hours, information material and small items from the sponsors MathWorks, SimPlan and Dualis, the 175 participants received a beer package in preparation for the digital beer tasting.

The 71 double-reviewed papers, the majority of which were printed in the conference proceedings, were divided into 28 different thematic sessions, ranging from discrete-event simulation to optimization, use of ML and AI, and energy considerations of digital models and plants. Zoom, as a digital tool for meetings, provided an opportunity for all attendees to speak and thus participate in the discussion. In this regard, the session chairs, who guided through the presentations and suitably presented speakers, had also contributed to a large extent to the success of the event. Most of the session chairs were already involved in the review process last year as part of the program committee to select the best contributions from the more than 100 submissions. That the contributions were of high qualitative value was also shown by the many questions and discussion contributions afterwards. Two contributions each received a best paper award for the best contribution from industry and research. Employees of Robert Bosch GmbH around Dr. Sarah Sitz and researchers of the chair FAPS around Tobias Lechler were happy about the award for the best industrial contribution for their paper entitled “Application of discrete-event material flow simulation in methods from continuous improvement in the manufacturing environment: success and effects of Speedweek 4.0”. The prize for the best scientific paper was awarded to Leonard Overbeck from KIT for the paper “Continuous validation and updating for high realism of digital twins of production systems”. We wish congratulations and good luck for the implementation and further development of the research results.

ASIM – Arbeitsgemeinschaft Simulation – is a working group in the German-speaking area for the promotion and further development of modeling and simulation in fundamentals and application as well as for the improvement of communication between theory and practice. ASIM is located as a technical committee in the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI). The ASIM symposium “Simulation in Production and Logistics” is the regular meeting of the specialist group 4.5.6 “Simulation in Production and Logistics” within ASIM.

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